Signs that you are getting older.

Oh, and an increased fear of death. Where's me dylar?

I'm becoming more and more afraid of death too, which sounds stupid considering I'm 24. It doesn't help that I'm an atheist as well.

Realizing that as much as i would like to play with flashcards on the floor of the school library with those schoolgirls that mary provided a link to and realizing too that their short skirts do in fact make me feel young again if you know what i mean, that part of me looks at them and thinks it's a shame that so many kids are on drugs and makes me wonder if it's too late for me to learn another language.

Ear hair growing.

yeah, what's up with that? That part of the brain is the first to go, i guess.

(and yeah, the eyebrow thing. It's so sudden!)

Yes, quite. I am rather annoyed with this manifestation.

Not to forget arse hair and, most conspicuously, palm hair.

: ((((((((((((((((((((((

Seems like folks turn into things that they'd never want
the only thing to live for is today...
I'm gonna put a hole in my T.V. set
I don't wanna grow up
open up the medicine chest
and I don't wanna gow up
I don't wanna have to shout it out
I don't wanna be filled with doubt
I don't wanna be a good boy scout
I don't wannt have to learn to count
I don't wanna have the biggest amount
I don't wanna grow up

Well when I see my parents fight
I don't wanna gow up
they all go out and drinking all night
and I don't wanna grow up
I'd rather stay here in my room
nothin' out there but sad and gloom
I don't wanna live in a big old tomb
on Grand Street

When I see the 5 o'clock news
I don't wanna grow up
comb their hair and shine their shoes
I don't wanna grow up
stay around in my old hometown
I don't wanna put no money down
I don't wanna get me a big old loan
work them fingers to the bone
I don't wanna float a broom
fall in love and get married then boom
how the hell did it get here so soon
I don't wanna grow up

I've got two big old white streaks in my beard. On either side of my chin. I'm not even 27! (and I've actually had random white hairs since I was 17, but now they're getting organized!)

When I stop and try to remember all I've done and felt in 49 years, I seem as old as Methuselah, but it is a rare day that I enter into such retrospections. If I recall correctly, the above statement applied with almost equal force when I was 25 - with almost equal truth, too. A lot of living can be squeezeed into a life. Actually, I recommend it. Boredom is something of a self-inflicted crime.

And grey pubes. Dead give-away.

I heard a friend say the other day it's the distinction between 'falling over' and 'having a fall'.

Mrs aldo had a fall last year.

The three stages of being old: when baseball players are younger than you; when baseball managers are younger than you; when the Pope is younger than you.

Felt it yesterday at a little garden fete, sitting on the grass as I do a lot in the summer, and just how long it took me to get up and adjust to standing fully upright. I used to just, you know, stand up... Now it's a full series of grunts and stretches

When you meet up with friends of around your age, and your default conversation starter is "ailments". That's definitely kicked in since I turned 60.

Haha

Death from old age

― Gear! (Gear!), Tuesday, 9 March 2004 02:35 (twenty-one years ago)

My brain is definitely operating in different ways, now. I struggled through my 30s to collate the immense amount of "memory" that my brain had recorded, and since then it feels as if we've decided to run a "greatest hits" reel at all times instead of having any standards of comprehensiveness

The three stages of being old: when baseball players are younger than you; when baseball managers are younger than you; when the Pope is younger than you.

I was just coming to this thread to say I've reached stage 3. You, too?

Second stage for me! I was dismayed when the Guardians hired Stephen Vogt, a whole 1.5 years younger than me.

Still waiting for a president younger than me; Obama was two months a bit older.

"two months and a bit"

When you find out Max Gogarty is 36 years old.

Stiffler's mom in American Pie was 37 (or at least Jennifer Coolidge was)

Anne Bancroft was 36 when The Graduate came out (Nichols tried hard to make her seem older).

Famously Cliff and Norm (and most of the Cheers cast) were in their early 30s when the show started

And Jason Alexander was 29 when Seinfeld debuted

Just because it never fails to freak me out: the age of the Traveling Wilburys when Vol.1 came out.

https://www.perfectduluthday.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-Wilbury-Index.jpg

Architect Louis Kahn did not produce his first masterpiece (Richards Medical Research Labs, Philly) until he was 56. Yeah yeah, big deal, I know, just trying to find something to hang onto.

Pauline Kael was 49 when she started at The New Yorker.

xxp holy shit - I'm older than all of them except Roy Orbison, and even then he was only a year older then than I am now.

Aye, same. Rough. Orbison giving big 'my mate's nan' energy in that picture. 52!

Joseph Conrad is the patron saint of procrastinating writers, his first novel coming out when he was 37 I think

posting something on ilx and thinking 'fuck did i already post this on this thread nineteen years ago'

I recently looked an album up on RYM, read the first review and went "I mostly agree with this but man this dude doesn't know how to write" then realized it was a review I had written some 15 years ago

"I recently looked an album up on RYM, read the first review and went "I mostly agree with this but man this dude doesn't know how to write" then realized it was a review I had written some 15 years ago"

I've had that. I remember binge-reading a blog called The Digital Antiquarian a while back. It has a great history of Infocom, which was especially interesting because I never had a chance to play the company's games when I was young. They weren't ported to the ZX Spectrum, so Infocom never developed the same legendary reputation in the UK that it had in the United States.

BUT! the thing that kept me reading is that the site has pretty thorough coverage of Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 as well. It went the extra mile. It got me to thinking about text adventures again. There's a sadness to them. They were one of the mother sauces of video games, but the genre was doomed.

Doomed to be swept aside by point and click adventures, which in turn were doomed to be swept aside by cat hair. And yet it's hard to feel too sad because Infocom in particular took the genre about as far as it could go. The one with the robots is still very clever. It's not as if text adventures didn't have a good run. And perhaps in the future if a solar flare destroys electricity and we have to communicate with morse code, text adventures will make a comeback. Text adventures, and play-by-mail wargames. Instead of wearing virtual reality glasses, people will wear actual glasses.

That was a deliberate stylistic parody of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, by the way. "Instead of wearing virtual reality glasses, people will wear actual glasses". It's exactly the kind of thing he would write in one of his columns. "One day China will pull the wool out from under our eyes, and people will stop wearing virtual reality glasses and wear actual glasses". That is him. He is in me.

Too much writing. If only I wrote less. Why am I writing this. What point was I trying to make. Yes. I remember now. I was reading the site's piece on Firebird and Rainbird when suddenly my name appeared. It was a link to a review of Starglider that I wrote while bored. An awful review. In over thirty years of being on the internet it dawned on me that I had finally made a connection with someone else, but it happened in 2015, ten years ago, and that person probably thinks I am an imbecile. Imagine catching the eye of someone attractive, but you're wearing your clown suit that day. That is how I felt. And yet I paid good money for that clown suit. The gusset is still strong.

Re-reading the review was not a pleasant experience. As mentioned passim I was, in 2006, in theory still a professional writer, but the review is obviously not up to a commercial standard, nowhere near. I was struck by the weirdly robotic avoidance of contractions. I could blame the tranquilisers, or the alcohol. But no, the problem is that it didn't have an editing pass or indeed any care or thought. Without editing, my writing is a self-indulgent, staccato mess of disjointed paragraphs. Bits of ideas that felt clever at the time but deserved better presentation. The fact is that Robin Williams' stream-of-consciousness act doesn't work in writing, and I am not Robin Williams. Podcasting, perhaps that's my natural habitat. Podcasting.

Without editing, I am George Lucas' first cut of Star Wars. I am Star Wars sans the slashing scissors of Marcia Lucas. But, dear reader, the same is true of every writer. That is why so many writers have their hard drives smashed when they die. The difference between self-indulgent nonsense and slashing, insightful prose is a lot of annoying, time-consuming editing. And the difference between a good writer and a mediocre writer is that the former requires less editing = greater throughput = more writing. Until the point where they decide to stop editing their work entirely, at which point they start writing novels about how feminism is taking over America and the only true men are men who eat raw bull testicles. It happened to Anne Rice! It can happen to you.

No, you must be willing to kill the bad plants. Uproot them. The bad plants crowd out the good plants. The good plants will grow to fill the space left behind by the absence of the bad plants. Eventually you will learn to enjoy killing plants. Then you will want to do nothing else. You will find yourself naked, in next door's garden, covered in soil, and then you too will be a writer.

Bands from my youth doing tours or shows to celebrate the 20th or 25th anniversary of an album

xp i thoroughly enjoyed reading that post - maybe it's a sign that i'm getting older.

Liking a band’s midlife crisis albums

farting when you pee

what the, i'm pretty sure i've done that all my life

not being able to remember whether farting during micturation was unusual when younger

pretty sure i've done that all my life

perhaps you're what's known as an 'old soul'

being able to remember times when i thought "i'm too old for this shit" & it was ~30 years ago

an old arse'ole maybe xp

referring to music from 25 years ago as "modern stuff"

I am displeased at how much younger Stephen Vogt is than me. I thought it would be close

xp
On a similar note:

You realize the "new" Fleetwood Mac (Buckingham Nicks edition) is 35 years old.

― nickn, Friday, November 12, 2010 1:48 PM (fourteen years ago)

This observation is now almost 15 years old.

US edition: You are inundated, completely drowning, in mailers from every possible healthcare company about "helping" you to sign up for their Medicare Advantage plan. This will begin approximately 6 months before you turn 65. It may actually never end.

I heard a friend say the other day it's the distinction between 'falling over' and 'having a fall'.

The other week I was at the supermarket and my cart began to roll away in the direction of someone else's vehicle. I reached out to grab it and my feet basically went "Nope" and I fell to my knees in the parking lot. I did manage to catch the cart before it hit the truck it was aiming for, but that was an unexpected moment of old-man frailty.

I recently broke my next to smallest toe (ring toe?) while making the bed. My toe caught the foot of the bed as I turned abruptly with a pillow. I heard a crack and went down on the ground, hugging the pillow and screaming into it for a while. Eventually I tried to move it and screamed into the pillow for a while longer. At some point I was just laying on the ground, looking at the ceiling, breathing hard and thinking about how lame it is to break a toe while making the bed.

Stuff like that happened to me a couple times until I finally broke down and bought a pair of crocs to wear around the house and protect my toes.

A young person offered me their seat on a bus the other day, first time this has happened.

'she sells sanctuary' came out 40 years ago tuesday

but also it's been 20+ years since alex in nyc pointed this out

A young person offered me their seat on a bus the other day, first time this has happened.

this happened me last summer! on the london underground. i am 42 now and was 41 then, so feels a bit premature. the teen kid was very posh and wearing a uniform from a very posh school and so i decided they must have it drilled into them to show deference to adults. it was during a mini-heatwave and i guess i was a bit sweaty also, but mostly i felt there's no way i even deserve the seat. i thanked him and let him stay sitting.

i do have a chronic illness which sometimes means i'd benefit from this but i was feeling great that day and it seldom be visible even if not.

"When the Archbishop of Canterbury start looking younger each time"

I said that 20 years ago ..

they must have it drilled into them to show deference to adults.

Basically yes. One of my childhood friends went to the local private boys school and he said that the rules were that they couldn't take a seat if others were standing, and that if they were already seated and someone got on the bus they had to offer the person their seat. Because I'm the kind of loser who still lives in the same area where they grew up, I see boys from the same school take that to an even greater extreme and more or less never take a seat on the bus if it's more than half full.

I went to the trampoline park and was there about 8 minutes before I injured myself to the point where I had to go to urgent care

that sucks and i'm sorry. reminds me of a little psa for my fellow getting olders, jumping is a really great thing to do regularly, like weekly, as exercise.

Might as well jump.

trampoline park

can't imagine how much they must pay for liability insurance... or do you sign a release?

My cousin broke both legs simultaneously on a trampoline

The Simpsons warned us about trampolines decades ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILD_61iAds0

You definitely sign a waiver. I went with my kid and bounced for five minutes and hurt myself. TOO OLD.